Friday, April 24, 2009

Anticipation

[This review of a largely unknown and unavailable Jean-Luc Godard short is presented here as a plea that The Criterion Collection should include this film as an extra on one of their forthcoming Godard DVDs. It would be a very timely and appropriate inclusion for any of the Godard films that Criterion currently plans to release. If you're interested in seeing this film, write to them and tell them about it.]

Anticipation was Jean-Luc Godard's contribution to the multi-director anthology film The Oldest Profession, a collection of shorts on the theme of prostitution, with contributions by Claude Autant-Lara, Philippe de Broca and other minor French filmmakers of the time. Needless to say, Godard's segment stands out. He filmed his contribution in late 1966, not long after finishing 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, with which it shares some commonalities in theme and style. But the film Anticipation resembles more than anything else is Alphaville, Godard's futuristic take on a society that has forgotten about love. In this short, the space traveler John Demetrius (Jacques Charrier) takes a break from his interstellar journey on Earth, where the solicitous planetary government — a Soviet-American alliance, confirming that this is the distant future — provides prostitutes for all travelers who request them.

The film thus opens with a wry sequence in which Demetrius sits in an airport lounge thumbing through a catalogue of pornographic pictures, in order to choose his companion for the night. Across from him sits a young female traveler, looking through a catalogue of her own for a male prostitute. The two travelers keep casting sly sidelong glances at one another, as though appraising the other in relation to the images in the magazine. It's a sharp commentary on the increasing distance between people in a culture dominated by images, in which actual flesh-and-blood human relationships are forced to compete with glossy simulacra and media fantasies. This becomes even more apparent in the rest of the film, in which Demetrius interacts with a pair of prostitutes, neither of whom can quite satisfy him. The first girl (Marilù Tolo) is pliant and willing, stripping for him in a businesslike way and preparing for bed. But he discovers that she is unable, or unwilling, to talk, to murmur even a word to him, instead lying there inert, another incarnation of the robotic women from Alphaville.

Enter Anna Karina, Godard's ex-wife in her last role with the director (even though the feature Made in USA is usually given that credit, evidence of how sadly forgotten this great short is). Here she's playing the prostitute Natasha, who's provided to Demetrius after his complaints about the first girl. Unlike her predecessor, Natasha can talk, but it soon emerges, to Demetrius' consternation, that that's all she's able to do. It seems that the division of labor has been applied to prostitutes, who are now super-specialized so that some of them are skilled in the physical acts of love, and some of them are skilled in expressing love verbally. No one in this futuristic society brings the two acts together as a unified whole, since love itself has been thoroughly suppressed, presumably along with the other emotions. This is a witty premise, and Godard builds a very flippant conceptual sci-fi piece around it. One of the best moments is the bizarre and hilarious sequence in which Natasha and Demetrius spray one another's mouths with water from an aerosol can, a fetishized sexual display in a culture where such mechanized rituals based around consumer products provide the only possible connections between people.

In fact, the alienation of people from each other is the film's key theme, as is the increasing compartmentalization of lives: love and sex are separated, conversation and meaning amputated from one another. Natasha speaks, but she does not mean what she says. Without deeper feelings behind them, her words are empty signifiers, suggesting a love that simply isn't there. For Godard, about to plunge at the end of the 60s into an in-depth consideration of semiotics and language in films like Le gai savoir and his work with the Dziga Vertov Group, this is a hint of things to come, the fascination with the relationships between language and meaning, between gestures and ideas.

It was also meant to be a glorious formal experiment, although Godard's intentions have often not been preserved in presentations of this film. The original American release version was a dubbed and censored travesty coated with an orange filter, while the only current way of seeing the film (sourced from an unsubtitled Japanese DVD) provides an uncensored and unaltered monochrome print that nevertheless does not preserve the radical formal interventions that Godard intended. The film as he originally conceived it was to have been printed with an alternating set of colored filters layered over the image, much as he had used during the infamous Brigitte Bardot nude scene that opened Contempt (this would certainly explain the female narrator who periodically intones colors as though signaling a filter change). Furthermore, Godard apparently planned to manipulate the images so that the characters would often appear as blurred, indistinct shapes, further accentuating the alienation and disconnections of the narrative.

Even in the monochrome version of the film, Godard's formal interest in this material is preserved in the final moments, in which Natasha and Demetrius tentatively rediscover the lost art of the kiss, which is both communication and lovemaking and thus sidesteps Natasha's limitations against performing physical acts of love. It's a wonderful conceit, on a par with the rediscovery of the words "I love you" as the key to Alphaville's finale. Godard sees hope and possibility in communication and genuine interpersonal connections, and he celebrates this connection by briefly strobing to full-color shots of the couple kissing and then a closeup of Karina smiling shyly at the camera as the film ends. On the soundtrack, the tranquil, robotic female narrator finally loses her cool, desperately repeating, "negative! negative!" In one of Godard's chilliest works, this kiss is another profound romantic gesture, maybe his last until rediscovering sensuality in the 80s: love conquers totalitarian control, and a kiss proves a more powerful form of communication than any government propaganda.

10 comments:

Compelling review of a film I haven't seen (and which it looks like I will be unable to see for a while; I should take you up on that e-mail Criterion suggestion). Brody's book posits the spraying as a very misogynistic image, Godard taking out his aggression on Karina (a reading which becomes even more bizarre than it already is when he notes, in a brief aside, that she then sprays her lover in the face as well).

One thing I did learn from his book, however, which surprised me greatly, was that Godard and Karina divorced late in '64, so that their marriage was already officially over and they were living separate lives as early as Pierrot le Fou. I had always thought that their romantic and cinematic involvement ended around the same time, but apparently this was not the case (as such, I guess you can revise "soon-to-be" ex-wife to read "recently divorced" or somesuch, unless Brody's fact-checking is as occasionally wild as his artistic interpretations...)

I think that's a great example of Brody obviously twisting facts to better fit his pre-baked (and probably half-baked) conclusions. Charrier sprays Karina, then she sprays him immediately afterward, and the two shots are treated identically. To interpret this as a punishment of Karina is just perverse. It's just Godard mocking consumer rituals and the fetishization of sexuality into stylized, mechanical gestures.

On looking it up, it seems they separated in 1964, divorced in 1965. I'd forgotten that.

Hi there, I've been reading this blog for a while and felt like I should chime in. I haven't seen Anticipation, of course, but I have read Brody's book and referring back to it, Brody says about the face spraying,

"It is Godard's most obscene and degrading shot to date, showing the cruel subjection of a woman, with her face sprayed as if with sperm or urine, which the actress is lapping up avidly. It is a view of Godard's readiness to both humiliate Karina and to show her in a state of carnal abasement- to a man who is not him."

Maybe it's just me, but I interpreted that as Godard showing contempt for both Karina and the man who, as Brody points out, is not him, possibly Karina's new lover. Then again, I can't be too sure of this until I've seen the movie myself.

Thanks for the exact Brody quote, Daniel. I still think he's badly misreading that scene. It's obviously sexual, but Karina is not "abased" to the other man in the film: they're engaging in a mutual sexual ritual of some kind. Moreover, in the film as a whole, Godard does not show contempt for these characters. The film's arc is a progression away from the empty, mechanized sexuality represented by that scene, towards a more communicative and passionate sexuality, getting back in touch with the concept of love. I think Brody's latching onto what he wants to see to prove his point.

Emailed. Hope it helps as you've made me intensely curious. I've not seen the short so I'm not going to comment on its contents beyond the fact that Godard never appeared to have any contempt for Anna K, at least not in my opinion.

Nice, Joshua. I hope many more follow suit and that Criterion pays attention - otherwise an important piece of Godard's 60s puzzle is going to remain missing for who knows how long.

And I agree about Godard's treatment of Karina. Godard has had some typical mother/whore issues with regards to women, and has sometimes worked them out in his films, especially the 60s films, but even when she was playing prostitutes Karina was always so charming and bright-eyed and quick-witted that it's hard for me to think of those films as contemptuous of her.

One of Brody's anecdotes is troubling, though, namely the tidbit that Godard changed the ending of Vivre sa vie after learning that Karina cheated on him. Apparently, Nana was originally supposed to live. So if that's true Godard was obviously letting some of his private anger slip into the film, though on the whole the film is still so sympathetic to her character that it's hard to reconcile it with the idea of Godard taking revenge on his actress wife. In any event, I think the one certain thing is that Godard's treatment of women, and Karina in particular, is much more complex than Brody suggests.

Needless to say, I also have not seen this film but I am most intrigued. It's Godard with a sniff of Antonioni. Your mention of MADE IN USA and 2 OR THREE THINGS is appropriate, as I believe those were the two newest Criterion announcements, and this would be great to have on either, especially with that thematic kinship with ALPHAVILLE, which I greatly admire. That's some Brody quote there!

In regards to that anecdote of Brody's, I have to mention that I never saw the ending of Vivre Sa Vie as anything less than sympathetic. In fact I'd say there's an absence of malice as pertaining to her character, I saw it as much more critical of the men.

I just thought it interesting to note that when asked about Anticipation's relationship with Alphaville after a screening of the later at the Melbourne International Film Festival, Karina said that she flat out had no recollection of making the short so couldn't comment. Clearly left a big impression on her!

The Conversations

The Conversations is a monthly series in which Jason Bellamy and I discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects, from critical analyses of particular films to comprehensive filmmaker overviews. Each discussion is published at The House Next Door.